Hi there, writers!
I hope you are faring well and taking care of yourself right now. As we know, narcissistic billionaire dictators are deflecting from their own criminal activities by starting wars.
The sad thing is that many political leaders fit this exact profile.
Meanwhile, the hits keep coming in higher ed. There’s so much depressing news about downsizing and deep budget cuts across colleges and universities.
I personally know a number of tenure-track and tenured faculty members who aren’t sure if they will continue to have jobs next year.
They are feeling the instability and contingency that adjunct lecturers have always been subject to in this unfair hierarchical system.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and unsure right now, I want to offer two small pieces of advice:
- Focus directly on what you can control in this moment and what you can contribute locally.
- Get some advice from your future self. If you go to Episode 47, I walk you through a future self visualization that is the exact same one I do with my own coaching clients.
Be assured that there is a grounded, wise part of you that knows exactly what to do and even how things will turn out.
Let me give you an example from my own life. I’m going to read to you a social media post I made a few weeks ago right after my son’s 6th birthday.
In it, I reflected on all the miracles that had to happen and the highly specific ways things had to align for my life to be what it is today.
And a key part of it was told to me by my future self.
This is what I wrote:
“I’m not someone for whom parenthood happened easily, although I always wanted it.
When I was 39, I was very single and doubting my life choices.
I had followed my career all over the world and felt like my chance to become a mom may have passed me by.
Then I did a future self exercise where you imagine your life in 10 years.
In it, I saw a little boy playing next to me. Somehow, I just knew that he was 7 years old.
This meant that I would have had him at age 42, pregnant at 41.
I was 39 (actually, 39-and-a-half). It didn’t seem possible.
So I got moving. I hired a dating coach and did a lot of inner work to shift my beliefs about what’s possible.
Six months later, I met my soulmate.
I got pregnant at 41 and had a baby at 42 – just as my vision predicted.
My son turned 6 yesterday.
Each day with him reminds me of everything that is, indeed, possible.”
So this was actually a big admission for me. I had never publicly admitted before to having hired a dating coach.
But I will say that being coached by her was one of the primary reasons I decided to get trained in life coaching.
Because even though we were focused on dating and relationships, all aspects of my life improved as a result of coaching and being guided by my own needs, strengths and values.
It really was miraculous.
So please, get in touch with your future self.
Okay, since I’ve been in a reflective mood, today I want to talk about something that comes up all the time in my coaching conversations, especially with women in mid-career.
I’ve had lot of discussions with associate and even full professors who have invested decades into their research, teaching, students and institutions.
They’re quite literally at the top of their games but something in them feels off. They often describe it in terms of boredom or feeling stuck and not knowing which direction to go.
But the common denominator is that their work does not give them the same sense of gratification or motivation as it used to.
Over time it becomes hard to ignore the fact that things have changed. But they’re not sure exactly what has changed or how to return to the way things used to feel.
It turns out that purpose naturally evolves over time because we keep evolving as people.
Unfortunately, academia provides almost no language to talk about professional evolution, which I want to distinguish from professional development, which is more skills-based.
So when these feelings show up for folks, they can feel confusing or even frightening.
Today I want to refer to an essay by author and professor Arthur Brooks to talk about the dramatic shifts academics can expect to go through in mid-career.
Let me tell you why shifting professional purpose is something to embrace rather than fear.
The Mid-Career Question Not Talked About Enough
So, as someone who obtained tenure before leaving a faculty position, I would say that academia is actually pretty good at giving you a roadmap for the first half of your career.
That is, if you are pursuing the traditional tenure-track path–which most cannot or will not these days.
But for the folks who do, the milestones are fairly clear:
As a grad student, publish some articles and finish your dissertation. Get a job (or a postdoc that leads to a job.)
Hustle hard during your pre-tenure years.
Build your research profile and publish as many articles as you can in high impact journals or a sole-authored book with a high-ranking press. Hopefully both!
Get grants and fellowships, the more competitive the better. Teach well and get good student evaluations.
Serve on committees in your department, in your institution, and in your discipline. Make sure people know who you are and what you study.
There’s more, I’m sure, but you get what I’m saying.
If you can do all of these things without pissing off too many people, you will likely earn tenure.
And there’s a strong sense of forward momentum built into this structure.
The dangling carrot of tenure is incredibly motivating (despite the fact that tenure is increasingly losing all meaning, but I digress).
And for many people, especially those who’ve had to fight hard to create a space for themselves in academia, that momentum can be key to their survival.
But what academia is not very good at is giving you any kind of roadmap for what comes next.
What happens when you finally reach the milestone of tenure?
Alternatively, I’ve noticed that another reckoning for many people comes from turning 40.
I work with a number of postdocs who are at or nearing 40, and they have a lot of very valid existential angst about their life direction.
And for those who’ve just gained tenure, which also happens around age 40 for many people, something interesting often happens.
New questions start to emerge for folks when work no longer only about proving yourself.
So instead of asking: “How do I achieve the next thing?” people often start wondering things like:
“Is this the life I still want?
Or, “What kind of academic career actually feels meaningful for me now?”
Or, “Do I want to keep doing things in the same way for another ten or twenty years? And if not, what do I want to do instead?”
I asked all of these questions myself.
And let me tell you, after wholly dedicating two decades of my life to academia these existential questions popping up inside me was scary AF!
It was the beginning of a huge identity crisis that lasted a couple of years where it became less and less clear if staying in the academy was the right choice for me.
It’s no coincidence that I started training to become a life coach just as I turned in my tenure file.
And I only realized later that there is such a thing as a post-tenure slump.
There’s an emotional dip you inevitably go through after sacrificing so much of your life, relationships and well-being to work.
Then you finally achieve your goal.
And instead of feeling triumphant, you may just feel tired or relieved or uncertain. In my case, I felt strangely empty.
I think that people don’t talk about the post-tenure slump much because it might make them seem ungrateful for the privilege they’ve been given of being a professor these days.
Looking back, I can see how so many of my colleagues a few years ahead of me went through this but never said anything about it.
Maybe they didn’t want to discourage junior faculty members from their own dreams.
But there was a palpable sense of dissatisfaction among folks after they returned from their sabbaticals.
Now I think they were probably asking existential questions about their careers, as nearly everyone does at that stage.
Tenure is built up as this time when you can do anything you want.
But academics have spent decades not doing what they want, so this open-endedness can feel both daunting and paralyzing.
Meanwhile, academia continues to narrowly define career success in ways that don’t change as people evolve. So through quantifiable external markers like research output, impact factors, and citation counts.
Let me just say the obvious thing: wanting something different at age 40, 45, or 50 than you wanted when you were in your late 20s or early 30s is to be expected!
So reaching tenure can be the beginning of a deeper reorientation back to your own values and priorities.
The Fear of Losing Relevance
I recently reread a really thought-provoking essay by Arthur Brooks from 2019. It was published in the Atlantic and called “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.”
Provocative title, no? And one that would definitely attract the interest of academics!
He begins with a compelling story.
Brooks was on a late-night flight when he overheard an older man quietly say to his wife, “I wish I was dead.”
And she responds, “It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”
When they got up to leave the plane, he saw that this man was extremely famous and well-respected for his professional accomplishments.
He writes, “As he walked up the aisle of the plane behind me, other passengers greeted him with veneration.
Standing at the door of the cockpit, the pilot stopped him and said, ‘Sir, I have admired you since I was a little boy.’
The older man—apparently wishing for death just a few minutes earlier—beamed with pride at the recognition of his past glories.”
This sent Brooks on a mission to understand what was going on here.
What he found was that for folks who’ve been extremely successful professionally, there is often this deep fear of becoming irrelevant when you’re no longer as productive.
As he states, “if you reach professional heights and are deeply invested in being high up, you can suffer mightily when you inevitably fall.”
Now, I’m not saying that most midcareer academics are feeling anything that dramatic.
But I do think many people who reach that stage carry a quieter version of that fear.
They might wonder things like:
“If I slow down… will I still be respected?”
“If I publish less… will I still belong here?”
“If I change my priorities… does that mean I’ve wasted everything I’ve worked so hard for?”
Academia trains us to attach our worth to output and productivity.
So when something shifts internally and the same things don’t bring the same satisfaction, it can feel destabilizing.
Embracing Career Decline as Normal
Brooks assures us that professional change is a very normal human pattern.
In fact, research on creative and intellectually demanding careers shows that productivity tends to rise for a period of time, peak, and then gradually decline.
He cites a number of studies about work that requires analytical capability and mental processing speed.
For a range of fields, people’s productivity generally increases for about twenty years and then begins to taper off.
So for many academics, when it comes to research output, that would be starting in your late 40s to early 50s.
For most people, this falls right in the Associate Professor stage.
That might create anxiety in you, and there are certainly outliers to every trend.
But what these studies are really pointing to is that high-speed innovation doesn’t stay constant forever. Which makes sense!
We are not designed to operate at maximum output indefinitely. And by midcareer, many other things are happening in your life.
Your energy may change. Your body may change.
You might be navigating perimenopause or menopause. And let just tell you as someone going through this phase of life, it is shocking to me how little doctors—even OB-GYNs—know about menopause.
Let’s talk about it more, okay?
You may be juggling caregiving responsibilities for kids and aging parents.
You’re probably dealing with chronic stress or the accumulated exhaustion of decades in institutions that demand too much and give too little.
And the culture of academia really doesn’t make room for any life changes. The machine keeps asking you to do more of the things that IT values.
And sometimes people want to keep publishing. But they want to focus on topics that feel more personally meaningful and do their research in more sustainable ways.
Other times, people want to stop doing as much research to focus on service or teaching or student mentorship.
And still others—myself being an example—get an itch to start a side hustle that utilizes your skills in a totally different way.
So of course, at some point in your career, it’s probably that an inner voice will start to question your path.
Fluid Intelligence vs. Crystallized Wisdom
What I like most about Brooks’ article is his discussion of different kinds of intelligence and how knowing the difference can help us accept these disorienting shifts.
So he talks about two kinds of intelligence: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to think quickly, solve new problems, and generate ideas rapidly. It tends to peak earlier in adulthood, like in your 30s and 40s.
Whereas crystallized intelligence is something different. It’s the ability to use knowledge you’ve gained from experience.
In other words, it’s wisdom that allows you to synthesize things easily and see connections others might miss.
Brooks writes, “Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.”
This distinction matters A LOT for academics.
Academic culture tends to celebrate fluid intelligence, things like innovative ideas and cutting-edge methods that get big grants and are published in high-impact journals.
But academia also absolutely needs crystallized intelligence. These scholars see the big picture.
They are responsive, reliable mentors who can skillfully guide their students through the messiness of their research projects.
They are conscientious teachers who blow their students’ minds by making knowledge relevant and meaningful to their own lives.
And they are often still researching, but in ways that complement these other areas instead of compete with them.
So, when your career starts shifting toward utilizing your wisdom rather than constant innovation, this isn’t really decline.
It’s shifting your contribution in other directions that you may not have given yourself permission to in the past.
In short, it’s evolution to becoming a more mature, more well-rounded scholar and person.
And it’s about creating a legacy that’s aligned with your own values and priorities, not just the academy’s.
Summing Everything Up
Today I’ve talked about the shift in purpose that often hits academics in mid-career.
Prestige and status might feel less important than it used to. You also don’t need to constantly prove yourself to others in the same way anymore.
And instead, you might want more spaciousness, connection, and meaning in your work.
A lot of times when this happens, folks start doubting whether the academy is right for them any longer.
But let me tell you from my own experience coaching many mid-career folks: leaving the academy is usually not necessary to finding renewed purpose.
Instead, it’s about giving yourself permission to shift your priorities in ways that make sense and feel good to YOU even if they might upset or confuse others.
Embrace the shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence.
Lean on your own wisdom to create a legacy that is not solely defined by quantifiable output.
You are allowed to shape the next phase of your career around personal meaning.
In short, if you’ve been feeling a bit off after having achieved a lot, your academic career probably isn’t at an end.
It’s just evolving in completely natural ways that not discussed openly enough.
So before we wrap up, I want to leave you with a few reflection questions:
First, what parts of your academic life still feel genuinely meaningful? How can you expand those things in new directions?
Second, what have you simply been doing out of habit? If you were to stop doing these things, where would you want to direct that energy instead?
And, finally, if you gave yourself permission to pursue something different now than you wanted when you were younger, what might your career look like in the years to come?
I bet that if you truly embrace—rather than resist—your own natural evolution, you’ll start to uncover a sense of renewed purpose.
Thanks so much for listening today.
I’ll talk to you again soon!